‘I need to speak to Chandler,’ I said.
‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Malcolm said. ‘I don’t quite know how we’re going to handle this yet, but it’s not going to be my wife’s way. Honestly, thinking she could blackmail the school by—’
‘It’s not blackmail,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s just fighting fire with fire. If they want to cast aspersions on his character, well, we can play that game too.’
‘I’ll go in there and talk to them myself,’ her husband said. ‘Give them a little lesson in freedom of expression. This is all a bunch of nonsense.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m supposed to be somewhere in half an hour.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘I have clients. I’m a financial adviser. I stopped by between appointments to pick up some files. It was nice to meet you, Mr Weaver, but I need to be shoving off shortly.’
‘I think maybe you should stick around,’ I said.
‘Why’s that?’
I saw that the laptop Chandler’s story had been on was still on the coffee table in the living room. ‘I’d like to read some more of your son’s story,’ I said, tipping my head in the direction of the computer.
‘Of course!’ Greta said, giving her husband a sharp, satisfied look, as if to tell him they were going to do this her way, no matter what he thought.
I dropped myself onto the couch and opened the laptop. When the screen came to life, the story was still on it. I started at the beginning, read it right through to the end. It was only about a thousand words, and I was reading quickly, so I was done in about three minutes. Twice I had to raise my hand when Malcolm Carson started to ask questions.
When I was finished, I said, ‘Okay.’
‘It’s better the second time you read it, don’t you think?’ Greta asked.
What struck me was not the story’s literary merit, but how close the names of the two characters in it — Charlie and Martin — were to Chandler and Michael.
‘Why’d you have to read it again?’ Malcolm asked. ‘The issue is not what’s in the story. The issue is that the school wants to control what its students think.’
‘Does Chandler have a girlfriend?’ I asked.
Malcolm looked as though I’d thrown cold water in his face. Maybe he wasn’t used to people answering his questions with more questions.
‘I’m not sure,’ Greta said. ‘There was a Karen a little while ago, but I think that ended.’
The girl being fought over in the short story was Katherine.
But the most troubling part of Chandler’s little assignment was that Charlie had killed Martin by whacking him in the head with a baseball bat.
In the woods.
‘Let’s get Chandler down here,’ I said. ‘Right now.’
Malcolm moved to the bottom of the stairs and called up: ‘Chandler!’
A muffled voice from behind a closed door shouted back: ‘What?’
‘Get down here!’
I heard a door open, then thumping on the stairs one might have associated with the approach of a stampeding rhino. When he hit the first floor and saw me sitting at the laptop, Chandler hit the brakes.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Mr Weaver is back to help us,’ Greta said.
I was not unaccustomed to misrepresenting myself in the pursuit of information, but I didn’t want to completely mislead the Carsons. I said, ‘I wouldn’t count on that. I’m just trying to sort out some things before I take my next step.’
Which might be turning Chandler over to the police for the murder of his friend Mike Vaughn.
‘Have a seat,’ I said to him.
He sat across the coffee table from me, squirmed for several seconds trying to get comfortable.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘When did you write this?’
‘I guess two, three days ago?’
‘Did you show it to anyone other than your teacher?’
Did I see something in his eyes? A brief look away? An attempt to avoid eye contact?
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I just gave it to her.’
‘And then she showed it to the principal and another person?’
‘Ms Brighton,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’
‘Why this story?’
‘Huh?’
‘Of all the stories you might have thought up, why did you write this specific story?’
‘Mr Weaver,’ Greta said, ‘you’re getting to the very heart of the creative process. Why does an artist paint what he paints? How does a songwriter choose the notes he chooses?’
Malcolm rolled his eyes. ‘I hardly think Chandler’s working in the same stratosphere as Picasso or Gershwin.’
‘But it’s all the same thing,’ Greta said. ‘Isn’t that right, Chandler?’
He nodded happily, as though she had rescued him. ‘Yeah, it’s like that. It just came to me, and I wrote it down.’
‘Honestly,’ Greta said, ‘the worst thing you can ask a writer is where he gets his ideas.’
‘Still,’ I persisted, ‘the story must have come from somewhere. A situation, something you experienced, then reinterpreted.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘Are Charlie and Martin based on anyone?’
‘Charlie and Martin?’
Was Chandler thick as a brick, or was he just very good at playing dumb?
‘The two boys in the story. Are they based on you and Mike? The names are somewhat the same.’
‘I don’t know. I guess maybe I named them that way sublimely.’
‘You mean subliminally?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘And the girl they’re fighting about is named Katherine. Would she be based on Karen?’
His eyes widened. ‘You know about Karen?’
‘Your mother said you were seeing a girl by that name.’
‘Yeah, well, for a while, sort of.’
‘Did you and Mike have a disagreement about her?’
‘Not lately.’
‘But at some point.’
His eyes seemed to be focused on the wall behind me, as though searching for a way out of this.
‘Yeah. A few weeks ago. He was... he and Karen were kind of making out at a party. I found them upstairs in a bedroom.’
‘What party was this? Whose house?’ Greta demanded.
I held up a hand. The problem of unsupervised parties was not on my list of priorities. ‘Go on.’
‘I was looking for Karen and going through the house, and I found them. Not actually doing it, but messing around. You know? I was pretty pissed with both of them, but especially him, cause he was supposed to be my friend. We kind of had it out at the party.’
‘Had it out?’
‘Kind of yelling at each other, shoving each other around.’
‘People saw this?’
He looked at me like I was a science teacher explaining the second law of thermonuclear dynamics. ‘Uh, yeah.’
‘Keep going.’
‘But we made up later. Him and Karen were a bit high, and they said they didn’t exactly know what they were doing.’
‘I can’t believe this sort of thing goes on,’ Greta said. ‘They were high?’
‘Mom, please.’
‘What about you? Were you high?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I mean, not very.’
Malcolm looked at his watch again. ‘Good God.’
‘So the part in your story about the two friends fighting over a girl named Katherine,’ I said, ‘parallels what actually happened between you and Michael over Karen.’
‘Parallels,’ Chandler repeated. ‘I guess.’
‘You own a baseball bat?’ I asked.
‘What?’ asked Greta. ‘Why are you asking that?’
Chandler shrugged. ‘I did. Me and some of my friends like to play. Sometimes we do it at the school.’
This struck me as almost quaint. I had been under the impression that today’s generation of teens had sworn off all physical activity except for texting.